Books
In the steppes of the Golden Horde
When I first visited the complex of Buddhist cave grottoes, dating from the fifth to the 14th century, at Bezekilk…
The great sulker
Ted ‘Grocer’ Heath, as he will always be for me, was chosen by his fellow MPs to be their leader…
Riding high
How’s this for a heartwarming set-up? Forty-something recovering alcoholic and aspiring artist Ginger copes with the disappointment of being unable…
Pitch perfect
One day, many seasons ago, Jon Hotten was on the field when a bowler took all ten wickets. In his…
Stiffen the sinews
It’s not unreasonable to expect that the anatomy syllabus for a medical degree should include breasts. Last year I performed…
Death in Greenwich
With the current political saga running in our heads, trumping all other stories, it has been hard to concentrate on…
Something new out of Africa
In a Johannesburg mall, a listless and lonely IT worker chats with his dad about the bitter fruits of upward…
Russia’s dumping ground
Almost as soon as Siberia was first colonised by Cossack conquistadors in the 17th century, it became a place of…
A familiar life (revisited)
A Life Revisited, as the modest, almost nervous, title suggests, mainly concerns Evelyn Waugh’s life with comments on but no…
Worlds apart
Classics is a boastful subject. Even the name — classics — has an inner boast; as does the classics course…
Daddy dearest
In 2004, after a 25-year estrangement, Susan Faludi’s father reappeared in her life via email. ‘I have had enough of…
The art of getting by
Naples, ragamuffin capital of the Italian south, is reckoned to be a hive of pickpocketing and black-market manoeuvrings. (A Neapolitan…
Making waves
The tour guides of Ephesus, in Turkey, have a nice party trick to wake up their dozing coach passengers. As…
The wonder of knowledge
‘Transparency,’ remarks Eliade Jenks, narrator of Joanna Kavenna’s fourth novel, A Field Guide to Reality, ‘is an aspiration. But wouldn’t…
Mournful and meticulous
After a curtain-twitching cul-de-sac, a Preston shopping precinct, and the Church of the Latter-Day Saints brought to Lancashire, Jenn Ashworth…
Food for thought
Elisabeth Luard has a fascinating and rich subject in the relationship between food and place. Humans eat differently according to…
Defeat by tweet and blog
The Wake, Paul Kingsnorth’s Booker-longlisted debut novel, was set just after the Norman Conquest, and was told in an odd…
Piety and savagery
First a confession. Like many modern British readers, I have contracted a severe case of Jihad Overload Syndrome. Symptoms of…
A trick of the light
There is a moment at the start of most authors’ careers when it is hard to get anything published, and…
Godly swingers
There were two communist manifestos of 1848. One had no influence whatsoever on the revolutions of that year, but now…
Music, love and all things human
When James Kelman won the Man Booker prize for How Late it Was, How Late, one judge stormed out, calling…
MPs and DTs
In 1964, a newly elected Labour MP was put in charge of the House of Commons kitchen committee. (An unpromising…
Back from the front
In his preface Sebastian Junger tells us that this book grew out of an earlier article. It obviously didn’t grow…
We’re all curators now
In January 1980 Isaac Asimov, writer of ‘hard science fiction’, professor of bio-chemistry and vice-president of Mensa International, penned a…
Good clean fun
The Detection Club is rather like the House of Lords of British crime writing, though considerably more select. (I should…
